How the soaring coast of diesel is hitting school budgets

**Peter O'Dowd** (0:01)
WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

**Trevor Greene** (0:06)
So, we're talking about the difference of having one teacher in our district, which is significant if you're a student.

**Chris Bentley** (0:13)
The high price of diesel has impacts far from the gas pump. One school district in Washington state says they're paying an extra $100,000 a year to fill up their fleet of busses, money they could have spent on hiring another teacher.
It's Friday, September 4th, and this is Here & Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley.
Today on the show, it's a back to school special. Depending on where you are in the country, kids have either been back in school for a month or so, or they're about to enjoy the last weekend of summer before returning to the classroom. Of course, for some people, the classroom is at home. In fact, homeschooling is on the rise in the US. We'll learn why.

**Kenny Anthony** (1:01)
I think in the public's mind, it's been associated with maybe religious conservatives or political conservatives, but that's not necessarily only true.

**Chris Bentley** (1:10)
We'll talk to author Katherine Rundell, who says children's literature is not just for kids.

**Katherine Rundell** (1:16)
The greatest children's books are, I think, a way of accessing that which is most sharp and clear within us.

**Chris Bentley** (1:24)
But first, schools across the country are getting squeezed by funding cuts and rising costs. One place they're feeling the pinch is in the cost of transportation. A third of districts said they had to tap into emergency funds this year to help fuel their fleets of school buses.
Diesel is on average $2 more expensive per gallon than it was one year ago. Trevor Greene knows that well. He is superintendent for Yakima School District in Yakima, Washington. He said they burned 87,000 gallons of diesel last year. At the current price, that would be over half a million bucks for fuel.
Greene tells Peter O'Dowd, they sometimes get cheaper diesel from the nearby Native American reservation. But, he says, higher costs are definitely having an impact.

**Trevor Greene** (2:13)
Well, we're strained in our budget in the state of Washington.
Education is not fully funded, even though that's the paramount duty of the state. We do anticipate that the price level of the district could expand an additional 130,000 this coming year on diesel fuel. To put that into perspective, the average cost of a single teacher in the district is just under $140,000 with salary and benefits. We're talking about the difference of having one teacher in our district, which is significant if you're a student.

**Peter O'Dowd** (2:42)
Yeah. Wow. Across the country, schools are making tough choices about programs and bus routes, and maybe even staffing.
What have you had to consider? What have you done to make up the difference?

**Trevor Greene** (2:55)
We worked on offsetting the cost by rerouting our buses and changing bell times, and that should actually lead to some savings. So the good news for us is it's given us a good excuse to look at doing work or operating a little bit differently. And with that, we think we'll be able to offset the cost this year.

**Peter O'Dowd** (3:14)
Tell me about shifting bell times. How does that help you?

**Trevor Greene** (3:18)
Well when we have multiple elementaries going at the same time, we have to have more buses out on the road. So if we can consolidate some of the routes and make them maybe a little bit longer, but half of our elementaries now start earlier, about 15 to 20 minutes earlier than another cohort of elementaries, which allows us some flexibility in having some rerouting issues and allows us to save and offset some of those costs.

**Peter O'Dowd** (3:47)
It sounds tough for your schools. What about the families that you serve in this part of Washington state? Are they feeling the price of diesel?

**Trevor Greene** (3:55)
They're feeling the price, our families, of every cost that does go up. We live in a community that's over 80%, our students are at 80% poverty on a scale of 100% obviously. And it does impact, prices go up and job salaries don't go up. And so that does create some decisions that have to be made, just like we're making here as a district and looking at streamlining opportunities that we have out there and looking at the challenges, as I just said, as opportunities and recognizing what we can control and what we can't. So, it's important not to admire the problem, but actually come up with a solution. And we're fortunate to have a small geographical footprint. So we're actually about 15 square miles. So our routes are shorter than most of our neighboring rural districts. So I do become more concerned, I think, if you're talking about some of the elongated routes of the mountainous regions, we have Natchez, which is near us. It has probably the greatest, largest geographical area in the state and serving students in a very small district. So I would imagine it's impacting them much differently.